UW Todayhttp://www.washington.edu/news
Mon, 30 Mar 2015 23:10:56 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1UW faculty team for five-year study of Seattle’s minimum wage increasehttp://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/30/uw-faculty-team-for-five-year-study-of-seattles-minimum-wage-increase/
http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/30/uw-faculty-team-for-five-year-study-of-seattles-minimum-wage-increase/#commentsMon, 30 Mar 2015 20:02:12 +0000http://www.washington.edu/news/?p=36233What will be the effects on workers, businesses, consumers and families of the city of Seattle’s ordinance increasing the minimum hourly wage to $15 by the year 2022?

Faculty from the University of Washington’s schools of public affairs, public health and social work are teaming up for The Seattle Minimum Wage Study, a five-year research project to learn that and more.

An ordinance passed by the Seattle City Council in June 2014 mandates a citywide minimum wage increase to $11 an hour on April 1 that will grow to $15 an hour by the year 2022. The council also resolved to evaluate the impact of that ordinance and is contracting with UW researchers and others for that work.

“Our goal is to make this a data-driven conversation about what is the good that is being done, what is the harm that is being done, and are we happy with that tradeoff,” Vigdor told Seattle NPR affiliate KUOW in a recent interview.

The study will be a multifaceted evaluation of the wage ordinance’s effects on workers, employers and the local economy. Its several components will include an employer survey and in-depth study of the effect on families as well as on regional pricing and administrative and census data.

The researchers listed fundamental questions about the higher minimum wage to be investigated in the research:

What is its impact on workers, their families, employers and the community?

Does it impact employment and earnings among low-wage workers?

Does it affect overall employment, business longevity or the mix of firms that do business in Seattle?

How does it affect consumer prices?

Does it improve quality of life measures, including health, nutrition and daily family life?

Does it affect public assistance program eligibility and benefits received?

Do nonprofit service organizations respond to higher wages by cutting back on services to vulnerable families?

How do low-income families and employers experience the implementation of the policy and how do they perceive its benefits and costs?

How do businesses adapt to higher labor costs?

The project will build on previous research by Plotnick, Long and Marieka Klawitter, also of the Evans School, on who would be affected by the wage increase. That report was released in March 2014, prior to the passage of the ordinance.

The researchers will provide the city of Seattle regular updates on their study as the wage increases are implemented.

Statutes Authorizing the University to Adopt Rules on This Subject: RCW 28B.20.130.

Reasons Why Rules on This Subject May Be Needed and What They Might Accomplish: Chapter 478-168 WAC has not received any substantive amendments to the code since 2004 and now requires various changes to conform with current practices of the University of Washington libraries.

Process for Developing New Rule: Agency study, including review by the UW Faculty Council on University Libraries.

Interested parties can participate in the decision to adopt the new rule and formulation of the proposed rule before publication by sending written comments or inquiries to Rebecca Goodwin Deardorff, Director of Rules Coordination:

]]>http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/29/notice-of-possible-rule-making-preproposal-statement-of-inquiry/feed/0UW Interim President Ana Mari Cauce statement on proposed House budgethttp://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/27/uw-interim-president-ana-mari-cauce-statement-on-proposed-house-budget/
http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/27/uw-interim-president-ana-mari-cauce-statement-on-proposed-house-budget/#commentsFri, 27 Mar 2015 23:37:44 +0000http://www.washington.edu/news/?p=36224The following statement is from University of Washington Interim President Ana Mari Cauce:

“I am pleased to see that the House budget begins the critical work of reinvesting in higher education for the benefit of our students and our state. The new funding for faculty and staff compensation, computer science enrollment expansion and medical residencies is critically important. The proposed budget in its entirety, however, may not be sufficient to keep tuition affordable and to fulfill our public commitment to deliver the innovations, discoveries, products and talented young people that our region needs. We must be about both access and excellence, and we will continue to stress that a robust state investment is critical.

“We are also extremely pleased that the House budget proposal recognizes the critical importance of keeping the UW’s #1-ranked primary care program in Spokane and of increasing our enrollment from 40 to 60 students per year. The transfer of $4.7 million in dedicated funding for our medical school from WSU to the UW will ensure that we can maintain and grow our medical education program to meet the critical physician workforce needs of the state.”

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]]>http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/27/uw-interim-president-ana-mari-cauce-statement-on-proposed-house-budget/feed/0UW scientists build a nanolaser using a single atomic sheethttp://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/23/uw-scientists-build-a-nanolaser-using-a-single-atomic-sheet/
http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/23/uw-scientists-build-a-nanolaser-using-a-single-atomic-sheet/#commentsMon, 23 Mar 2015 20:54:20 +0000http://www.washington.edu/news/?p=36154University of Washington scientists have built a new nanometer-sized laser — using the thinnest semiconductor available today — that is energy efficient, easy to build and compatible with existing electronics.

Lasers play essential roles in countless technologies, from medical therapies to metal cutters to electronic gadgets. But to meet modern needs in computation, communications, imaging and sensing, scientists are striving to create ever-smaller laser systems that also consume less energy.

The ultra-thin semiconductor, which is about 100,000 times thinner than a human hair, stretches across the top of the photonic cavity.U of Washington

The UW nanolaser, developed in collaboration with Stanford University, uses a tungsten-based semiconductor only three atoms thick as the “gain material” that emits light. The technology is described in a paper published in the March 16 online edition of Nature.

“This is a recently discovered, new type of semiconductor which is very thin and emits light efficiently,” said Sanfeng Wu, lead author and a UW doctoral candidate in physics. “Researchers are making transistors, light-emitting diodes, and solar cells based on this material because of its properties. And now, nanolasers.”

Nanolasers — which are so small they can’t be seen with the eye — have the potential to be used in a wide range of applications from next-generation computing to implantable microchips that monitor health problems. But nanolasers so far haven’t strayed far from the research lab.

Other nanolaser designs use gain materials that are either much thicker or that are embedded in the structure of the cavity that captures light. That makes them difficult to build and to integrate with modern electrical circuits and computing technologies.

The UW version, instead, uses a flat sheet that can be placed directly on top of a commonly used optical cavity, a tiny cave that confines and intensifies light. The ultrathin nature of the semiconductor — made from a single layer of a tungsten-based molecule — yields efficient coordination between the two key components of the laser.

The UW nanolaser requires only 27 nanowatts to kickstart its beam, which means it is very energy efficient.

Other advantages of the UW team’s nanolaser are that it can be easily fabricated, and it can potentially work with silicon components common in modern electronics. Using a separate atomic sheet as the gain material offers versatility and the opportunity to more easily manipulate its properties.

“You can think of it as the difference between a cell phone where the SIM card is embedded into the phone versus one that’s removable,” said co-author Arka Majumdar, UW assistant professor of electrical engineering and of physics.

“When you’re working with other materials, your gain medium is embedded and you can’t change it. In our nanolasers, you can take the monolayer out or put it back, and it’s much easier to change around,” he said.

This emission map of the nano-device shows the light is confined by and emitted from the photonic cavity.U of Washington

The researchers hope this and other recent innovations will enable them to produce an electrically-driven nanolaser that could open the door to using light, rather than electrons, to transfer information between computer chips and boards.

The current process can cause systems to overheat and wastes power, so companies such as Facebook, Oracle, HP, Google and Intel with massive data centers are keenly interested in more energy-efficient solutions.

Using photons rather than electrons to transfer that information would consume less energy and could enable next-generation computing that breaks current bandwidth and power limitations. The recently proven UW nanolaser technology is one step toward making optical computing and short distance optical communication a reality.

“We all want to make devices run faster with less energy consumption, so we need new technologies,” said co-author Xiaodong Xu, UW associate professor of materials science and engineering and of physics. “The real innovation in this new approach of ours, compared to the old nanolasers, is that we’re able to have scalability and more controls.”

Still, there’s more work to be done in the near future, Xu said. Next steps include investigating photon statistics to establish the coherent properties of the laser’s light.

Co-authors are John Schaibley of the UW, Liefeng Feng of the UW and Tianjin University in China, Sonia Buckley and Jelena Vuckovic of Stanford University, Jiaqiang Yan and David G. Mandrus of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Fariba Hatami of Humboldt University in Berlin and Wang Yao of the University of Hong Kong.

Primary funding came from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Other funders include the National Science Foundation, the state of Washington through the Clean Energy Institute, the Presidential Early Award for Scientists and Engineers administered through the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the European Commission.

]]>http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/23/uw-scientists-build-a-nanolaser-using-a-single-atomic-sheet/feed/0Mia Tuan named dean of the UW’s College of Educationhttp://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/23/mia-tuan-named-dean-of-the-uws-college-of-education/
http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/23/mia-tuan-named-dean-of-the-uws-college-of-education/#commentsMon, 23 Mar 2015 18:23:25 +0000http://www.washington.edu/news/?p=36182Mia Tuan has been named dean of the College of Education at the University of Washington, interim President Ana Mari Cauce and interim Provost Jerry Baldasty announced today. Tuan comes to the UW from the University of Oregon, where she has held a number of academic and leadership positions over the past 18 years. The appointment, effective July 1, 2015, is subject to approval by the UW Board of Regents.

Mia Tuan

“Mia Tuan brings a wealth of successful administrative experience in several different roles to this position,” said Cauce. “She is a highly productive and well-respected scholar and brings a very interesting multiplicity of perspectives to the business of training teachers and educators. We are very excited to bring her to the UW and look forward to her leadership of this key college in the education of our youth.”

Tuan, a professor of education studies, served as interim dean of UO’s College of Education from 2013 to 2014, and was associate dean of its Graduate School for three years prior. She is also a former director of UO’s Center on Diversity & Community, and was director of the sociology department’s honors program. Tuan became an assistant professor of sociology at UO in 1996, before becoming an associate professor in 2002. In 2007 she joined the College of Education and was named a professor of education studies in 2009. Tuan has won numerous academic awards, including the 2012 Western Association of Graduate Schools (WAGS) and Education Testing Services (ETS) Award for Excellence and Innovation, for Diversifying Graduate Education in STEM Disciplines.

She is the author of numerous scholarly articles and three books, Choosing Ethnicity, Negotiating Race: Korean Adoptees in America; Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute; and Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Contemporary Asian Ethnic Experience. Her research focuses on racial and ethnic identity development, Asian transracial adoption, and majority/minority relations.

Tuan received her bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1990, magna cum laude, her master’s in sociology from UCLA in 1992, and her doctorate in sociology, also from UCLA, in 1996.

“The Hard problem,” the second book by Charles Johnson and his daughter, Elisheba Johnson, is now available.Illustration by Charles Johnson

Charles Johnson is the Pollock Professor of English, now emeritus, at the University of Washington. He is the author of 21 books over a 50-year career and the recipient of numerous other awards and honorary degrees.

“The Words and Wisdom of Charles Johnson” reflects a year of questions posed to you by poet and teacher E. Ethelbert Miller and ranges across more than 600 pages. How did this unusual collaboration come about?

CJ: At the beginning of 2011, Ethelbert approached me with a proposal to ask me questions covering a wide range of topics for an entire year. He asked me 400, and of those I answered 218, often at length in the form of mini-essays on virtually every subject under the sun — writing craft; literature black and white; Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism; Western philosophy; cartooning and the visual arts; the martial arts; the film work I did for 20 years for PBS and Hollywood studios; the practice of meditation; the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.; my personal life and habits — you name it.

For me, it was a real brain dump. There’s no book like this anywhere in world literature — a very candid, detailed look into a writer’s mind and heart and journey through this life. It was a fascinating challenge for both of us. Ethelbert had to read all my novels, stories, essays, book prefaces and introductions, and because he is an arts advocate and chairs a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., the Institute for Policy Studies, many of his questions have a political flavor. Really, the 672-page “Words and Wisdom” is as much his book as it is mine.

More on the “Emery Project”:

Elisheba and Charles Johnson will soon release “Emery’s World of Science,” a K-12 calendar highlighting the achievements of African-American scientists. It will be available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

March 28: Remembering cartoonist Morrie Turner: Johnson will be at the Northwest African American Museum 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday, March 28, to discuss the life and work of Turner, creator of the “Wee Pals” comic strip, and to present a documentary about Turner called “Keeping Faith with Morrie.”

You started as a cartoonist. Now you have returned to cartoon illustration for the “Adventures of Emery Jones, Boy Wonder” series that you co-write with your daughter, artist Elisheba Johnson. The second of these books, “The Hard Problem” is now available. What was it like to draw professionally again?

CJ: Being able to draw professionally again for publication has been a blessing for me. Between 1965 (when I was 17) and 1972, I worked intensely as a professional illustrator and cartoonist, publishing thousands of drawings as a college undergraduate, everything from comic strips to panel cartoons and editorial cartoons. My work appeared in the black press (Black World, Jet, Ebony), The Chicago Tribune, a newspaper in southern Illinois, and really everywhere I could find.

Two new titles by the prolific Charles Johnson, UW professor emeritus of English.

I also published two books, “Black Humor” (1970) and “Half-Past Nation-Time” (1972), and I did one of the early how-to-draw TV shows, “Charlie’s Pad” (1970), which ran on PBS stations all over the country. But when I transitioned into working on my Ph.D. in philosophy in the early ’70s, then teaching in an English department for 33 years, those fields and the book world never gave me an opportunity to draw, which was my first love since childhood.

When my daughter and I began “Bending Time” in 2012, I hadn’t drawn for publication in three years. But our illustrator bailed on us at the last minute so I had exactly 18 days and nights to dust off my ink pens and do the 10 drawings. But that got me back into the swing of things. I did 20 for “The Hard Problem” and spent an entire year — at Elisheba’s suggestion — drawing a weekly, science-based “Emery’s World” cartoon to promote our series on social media. It’s been wonderful, like a homecoming, or returning to my creative roots.

Another blessing — and every artist-father’s dream — is the experience of creating a series of children’s books (though they’re certainly for adults, too) with my artist-daughter. We’ve been told that the Emery Jones series is the first black, father-daughter fiction collaboration. The main character is named after her son, my grandson, Emery, who is now 3 years old.

You’ve said that the old adage, “90 percent of writing is rewriting” pertains to your work as well. But is the process different when you and your daughter co-write the Emery Jones books? How does that collaboration work?

CJ: When we co-author the Emery Jones books, I ruthlessly revise the prose passages I compose, as I do with anything I write. But I don’t touch the prose or poems Elisheba contributes (she has two poems in “The Hard Problem”), though she will revise my lines if she doesn’t like something.

With these children’s or young adult books, I trust her language and thoughts because she’s closer to the way young people and kids think and feel than I am.

Charles Johnson’s novel “Middle Passage,” which won the 1991 National Book Award for Fiction, is getting a 25th anniversary release this year.

Your 1990 novel “Middle Passage” won the National Book Award for fiction. The New York Times called it “fiction that hooks into the mind.” Did the success of that book change your life or work?

CJ: My publisher is releasing this year a “Scribner Classic” edition of that novel to celebrate its 25th anniversary, with an introduction by cultural critic Stanley Crouch (who was my guest the night of the National Book Award ceremony in 1990), a new cover and new quotes about it from other writers.

Receiving that national fiction prize — only the second time a black male writer had gotten it after Ralph Ellison for “Invisible Man” in 1953 — catapulted my “career” (a word I dislike because I don’t like to think of myself as “careerist,” but simply as someone who loves to create). But my family has always been more important to me than anything in the art, literary or academic worlds. So my life, work and reasons for creating have remained the same since I began publishing stories and drawings 50 years ago.

In “Taming the Ox” you discussed Barack Obama in 2008 when his presidential campaign was gaining momentum. You described the “Obama phenomenon” as “not so much revolutionary as it is potentially evolutionary,” from a Buddhist perspective. Now, late in the president’s second term, how do you think that evolution has gone?

CJ: Well, as we know, evolution moves slowly, ponderously, and often at a glacial pace. But we can finally take off the table a discussion that dates back to the founding of this republic: namely, the issue of whether a black person could ever become president or leader of his or her nation. (That still hasn’t happened in Europe or the other western democracies.)

As his second term draws toward an end, there are certainly paleo-racists out there, real Neanderthals, who are still fixed on this bi-racial president’s “race,” but generally I think most people have been more concerned with his daily performance as the president and his policies rather than how much melanin he has. I see that as incremental progress.

But does that mean we’ve entered what some people call a “post-racial” period in American history? I think not. “Race” is still a lived-illusion for far too many people.

Charles Johnson

Finally, scholars pronounce the concept of The Novel dead every decade or so, yet readers continue to enjoy fiction. What do you think is fiction’s current state of health?

CJ: If we judge the health of fiction by the amount of novels being produced today, which is enormous, with so many authors self-publishing or using nontraditional ways to get their work directly to readers, then I think we would have to conclude that this is a robust period for literary creation of works good, bad, and ugly.

Readers will always enjoy good, imaginative storytelling, which is as old as humanity itself. And the English (and American) novel is just one form of storytelling, albeit one that is capacious and capable of assuming many forms of narrative art since Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela” in 1739, Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” in 1719, “Moll Flanders” in 1722, and “proto-novels” such as Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur” (1485) and Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” (1605-15).

Really, what we call the novel is too much of a shape-shifter to ever die.

]]>http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/23/author-charles-johnson-discusses-new-work-and-the-return-of-emery-jones/feed/0UW geologist, engineer reflect back one year later on nation’s deadliest landslidehttp://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/19/uw-geologist-engineer-reflect-back-one-year-later-on-nations-deadliest-landslide/
http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/19/uw-geologist-engineer-reflect-back-one-year-later-on-nations-deadliest-landslide/#commentsThu, 19 Mar 2015 22:03:31 +0000http://www.washington.edu/news/?p=36135On March 22, 2014, the deadliest landslide in U.S. history struck Oso, Washington. The year since then has been relentless for University of Washington researchers who helped answer questions, survey the aftermath and address issues raised by the disaster that killed 43 people.

David Montgomery, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, and Joseph Wartman, a UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, sat down last week to look back at the past year.

What were those first days like for you, as reports were coming out about the mudslide?

DM: I remember scrambling for information. The people who really knew what was going on were onsite, but they had their hands full and they didn’t need to be bothered by the media. So that role fell to people like Joe and I, who were at a bit of a distance, but who had some expertise. Yet we didn’t have direct access to the slide because we weren’t part of the rescue and then recovery efforts. I spent a lot of time simply trying to figure out what happened, so I could communicate without making major errors.

JW: For me, it was trying to get a sense of whether there was anything to the initial human loss estimates. It’s hard for us in a developed nation to think that there can be that kind of large loss of life from a single event. Those are numbers you read about in Afghanistan or Central America or Latin America, where they don’t necessarily have the same land-use controls. Often, the loss estimates go down very quickly as people continue to show up to community centers, and often the initial estimates are quite exaggerated. But that wasn’t the case here.

Were there any geological clues that this might happen?

JW: I remember having a very strong reaction the first time I looked at the Lidar data. You can immediately see there are other large-scale landsides in the immediate vicinity of Oso. It was striking, and it was also upsetting to see as the aftermath was playing out, because you could clearly see a history of this kind of event at that location.

DM: If you look at the hazard maps that were available to the residents of Steelhead Drive before the 2014 landslide, they all showed a landslide on the valley wall across the river, the old Hazel landslide. There was no landslide hazard depicted on the valley bottom where people were living, yet we know that the risk from landslides is not just from where they are, but how far they may go and how likely that is. Without such information people can’t make fully informed decisions about whether they’re willing to buy a house in a landslide-prone area.

JW: When I talk with people from the Oso area, I’ve been surprised to hear how many people say they simply weren’t aware that anything like this could have happened. So I think there’s some breakdown there, because the scientists who look at the Lidar data can in an instant realize that it certainly falls within the realm of possibility, and has happened before in the not-so-distant past.

How would you describe the past year?

JW: In some ways it seems like it’s been much, much longer than a year. I think we compressed a lot of science into a very short amount of time. Sometimes the investigation takes a couple of years, but many basic questions about this event were answered quickly. Yet there’s so much work to do in terms of informing the public. People have important questions about landslide hazard risk, and I can’t keep up with all of the inquiries.

What was it like investigating a geological disaster so close to home?

Joseph Wartman and David Montgomery

JW: All of the disasters I’ve studied have occurred in locations I’ve had to fly to. This is the first time I’ve worked on a geological disaster where I’ve met the survivors, or family members of survivors, and it’s become much more personal.

DM: Most other big disasters, like Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, we’ve gotten there years afterwards when it’s not so fresh and so raw. And it’s farther from home. Working on the site itself was a mix of intriguing geology on the upper half of the site, where we were trying to figure out the pieces of the puzzle of how this thing happened, but then going down to the bottom half where the community had been. It was devastating to find a basketball, kids’ shoes and pieces of houses. It was hard being there, walking around knowing what happened.

Are other areas at risk?

JW: Are there other Osos? I just don’t think we know. Our approach to landslide hazard mapping has been piecemeal. Without a single authority charged to look at this, people have applied different standards, and there is no single hazard map. That lack of a larger overseeing entity has resulted in this piecemeal patchwork.

DM: One of the big questions is: How many other areas are there on the west slope of the Cascades where that same combination of river incision into glacial sediment could play out? I’m not aware of any systematic effort to go through and survey and look at that.

Do you see any policy responses to Oso?

JW: It’s undoubtedly had a short-term impact. The question that remains is what the shelf life is of Oso in terms of whether it will result in any meaningful changes down the road for new programs, or funding for landslide hazards. I can be pessimistic. It’s the 10-year anniversary of the La Conchita landslide. Three children were living there in 2005, many of them were killed, and now it’s estimated that 30 children are living there.

DM: We’ve had communities moving farther up into the mountains, not just in this state, but all around the country. If you take a landside like Oso and it happens in a wilderness area, it’s a geological oddity. If it happens in a subdivision, it’s an absolute catastrophe. […] The funding for our state’s landslide program is for one half-time employee, and has been for some time. The SR530 commission recommended expanding the geological hazard and risk mapping in Washington state, and explicitly in our recommendation was to include the potential landslide zones and run-out zones. That bill is now advancing through the state legislature.

What is next? What would you like to see?

JW: Direct federal expenditures from Oso have been over $120 million. The cost to implement a landslide mapping program could be a fraction of that. With the availability of Lidar and the 3D Elevation Program that would do it for the entire U.S., it’s now within our grasp to do hazard mapping in a cost-effective manner.

DM: For over the past decade, the annual funding for the USGS landslide program has been roughly the cost of sending two people to Afghanistan for a year. Yet what puts Americans in more harm, more directly, in more days of the year? It seems to me that when we think about where we are spending our money we should consider how we are not making it a priority to protect people at home.

Any closing thoughts?

JW: Over the last year you can’t help but be introspective about whether all the work you’re doing is, in the end, doing anything to reduce the occurrence of Oso-type events. One of the things that’s become much more apparent to me is just the importance of making sure the science doesn’t die on the vine. We need to be making sure it reaches the public and that the products of our work are understandable to the public.

DM: That Lidar data had been sitting around since 2003, for more than a decade. If we have great data and great techniques to analyze it, but if no one’s actually using that to go look systematically at the places where people may be in harm’s way and then conveying that information to the general public, then we build in a gulf between the state of knowledge and the state of practice. A key challenge is to close the gap between what we know how to do as a field, and what’s being done on the applied end, outside of the geological research community.

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For more information, contact Wartman at wartman@uw.edu or 206-685-4806 and Montgomery at 206-685-2560 or bigdirt@uw.edu. Note: Wartman is on travel and best reached via email.

]]>http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/19/uw-geologist-engineer-reflect-back-one-year-later-on-nations-deadliest-landslide/feed/0Suspension leads to more pot use among teens, study findshttp://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/19/suspension-leads-to-more-pot-use-among-teens-study-finds/
http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/03/19/suspension-leads-to-more-pot-use-among-teens-study-finds/#commentsThu, 19 Mar 2015 20:48:32 +0000http://www.washington.edu/news/?p=36124Suspending kids from school for using marijuana is likely to lead to more — not less — pot use among their classmates, a new study finds.

Counseling was found to be a much more effective means of combating marijuana use. And while enforcement of anti-drug policies is a key factor in whether teens use marijuana, the way schools respond to policy violators matters greatly.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Washington and in Australia, compared drug policies at schools in Washington state and Victoria, Australia, to determine how they impacted student marijuana use.

The results startled researchers: Students attending schools with suspension policies for illicit drug use were 1.6 times more likely than their peers at schools without such policies to use marijuana in the next year — and that was the case with the student body as a whole, not just those who were suspended.

“That was surprising to us,” said co-author Richard Catalano, professor of social work and co-founder of the Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work. “It means that suspensions are certainly not having a deterrent effect. It’s just the opposite.”

By contrast, the study found that students attending schools with policies of referring pot-using students to a teacher to discuss the dangers of marijuana use were 50 percent less likely to use marijuana. Other ways of responding to policy violators — sending them to educational programs, referring them to a school counselor or nurse, expelling them or calling the police — were found to have no significant impact on marijuana use.

The results were published online March 19 in the American Journal of Public Health.

Data for the research come from the International Youth Development Study, a long-term initiative started in 2002 to examine behaviors among young people in Washington and Victoria. The two states were chosen since they are similar in size and demographics, but differ considerably in their approaches to drug use among students. Washington schools are more likely to suspend students, call police or require offenders to attend education or cessation programs, the researchers note, while Victoria schools emphasize a harm-reduction approach that favors counseling.

Researchers surveyed more than 3,200 seventh- and ninth-graders and nearly 200 school administrators in both 2002 and 2003. Students were asked about their use of marijuana, alcohol and cigarettes and also about their schools’ drug policies and enforcement. In both survey years, pot use was higher among Washington students than those in Victoria — almost 12 percent of Washington ninth-graders had used marijuana in the past month, compared with just over 9 percent of Victoria ninth-graders.

The researchers were initially most interested in teens’ use of alcohol and cigarettes, Catalano said. But after Washington legalized recreational marijuana use for adults in 2012, researchers decided to take a closer look at the data to determine how legalization might influence students in Washington versus their counterparts in Australia, where pot remains illegal.

Tracy Evans-Whipp, the study’s lead author, said though the policies and marijuana use studied predate marijuana legalization in Washington, the findings provide useful insights about what types of school policies are most effective in steering teens away from the drug.

“Cross-national similarities in our findings suggest that school policy impacts on student marijuana use are unlikely to change, despite Washington legalizing marijuana,” said Evans-Whipp, research fellow at the Centre for Adolescent Health and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Victoria.

Research has shown a consistent link between increased access to marijuana and higher rates of self-reported use by adolescents, the study notes. In Washington and Colorado, where recreational marijuana use by adults was also legalized in 2012, school systems have new responsibilities to adequately educate students about marijuana and respond effectively when teens are caught using it, Catalano said.

“To reduce marijuana use among all students, we need to ensure that schools are using drug policies that respond to policy violations by educating or counseling students, not just penalizing them,” he said.

Other co-authors are Todd Herrenkohl at the UW, Stephanie Plenty at the Centre for Health Equity Studies in Sweden and John Toumbourou at Deakin University in Australia.

Though many animals can move with more precision and accuracy than our best-engineered aircraft and technologies, gyroscopes are rarely found in nature. Scientists know of just one group of insects, the group including flies, that has something that behaves like a gyroscope — sensors called halteres, clublike structures that evolved from wings.

Halteres provide information about the rotation of the body during flight, which helps flies perform aerial acrobatics and maintain stability and direction. But how do other insects without these sensors regulate flight dynamics, biologists have wondered?

University of Washington research suggests that insects’ wings may also serve a gyroscopic function — a discovery that sheds new insight on natural flight and could help with developing new sensory systems in engineering.

Read about the UW’s new Air Force Center of Excellence on Nature-Inspired Flight Technologies and Ideas.

“I was surprised at the results,” said Brad Dickerson, a graduate student in biology and co-author of the study. “This idea of wings being gyroscopes has existed for a long time, but this paper is the first to really address how that would be possible.”

Dickerson and another UW graduate student, Annika Eberle, conducted the research seeking to determine whether insects could use the bending of their wings to sense rotations of their bodies during flight. This could help explain how these master flyers are able to move with precision and speed.

The pair first developed a computational model of a flapping, flexing, rotating plate. To test their results, they built a robotic model using plastic sheeting mounted on a motor to simulate a flapping wing, then mounted that structure onto a second motor to rotate it.

A robber fly with a very large haltere (inside yellow box). Halteres are sensors that act like gyroscopes, providing information about the insect’s body rotations during flight.Armin Hinterwirth

They discovered that the model wing twisted when flapped and rotated around its base, causing changes in patterns of strain across the wing’s surface. The researchers believe that the strain might stimulate sensors embedded in the wing — suggesting that the wings of flying insects might, as halteres do, provide them with gyroscopic information.

Eberle, a graduate student in mechanical engineering and the paper’s corresponding author, said the results suggest that additional information about flight dynamics could be gleaned by embedding sensors onto the surface of manufactured wings. In turn, that knowledge could eventually help engineers design more efficient wings for structures such as micro air vehicles, helicopters and turbines.

But first, Eberle said, more research is needed to determine what relationship exists between animals’ wing flexibility and sensing capability.

Catalyst Quartet
7:30 p.m., March 19 | Meany Hall
The mission of the ensemble is to advance diversity in classical music and inspire new and young audiences with dynamic performances of cutting-edge repertoire by a wide range of composers. Founded by the Sphinx Organization, the Catalyst Quartet combines a serious commitment to education with a passion for contemporary works. More info.

Object Narratives
7 p.m., March 19 | Henry Art Gallery
Join Sandra Kroupa, Book Arts and Rare Books Curator with UW Special Collections, for a presentation centered on how artists, writers, and researchers are inspired by direct connection with the historical object. More info.

Dew Eagle Strike Through the Sky by Linley Logan. Logan is a participating artist (prints and cards) at the Native Art Market on March 29 at the Burke Museum.Linley Logan

A silent reading with Ann Hamilton and Joshua Bechman
7 p.m., March 26 | Henry Art Gallery
This collaboration between artist Hamilton and poet Beckman focuses on silent reading as shared experience. Working with Beckman’s meticulously collected text fragments that reference the lives, songs and calls of eighteenth– and nineteenth-century birds, Hamilton created video fragments to be projected on the walls of the Henry Art Gallery’s lower level gallery housing the field of bullroarers. More info.

Native Art Weekend
March 27-29 | Burke Museum
This two-day art symposium, in conjunction with the Burke Museum’s current exhibition, “Here & Now: Native Artists Inspired,” brings together Native artists and scholars to discuss current trends in the distinctive art traditions of the Northwest.

“Israel Among the Angels: Views from Jewish Antiquity”
7 p.m., March 31 | Hillel UW, 4745 17th Ave NE
Professor Mika Ahuvia,Assistant Professor of Classical Judaism in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, discusses how and why angels appeared in mystical, liturgical, and magical contexts in Jewish antiquity. This event is free and open to the public. Kosher reception will follow the lecture. More info.